Been having this problem at work for quite some time and the IT guys have yet to be able to find a solution.

Our NAS drive seems to have serious issues with InDesign CS5.5 (and sometimes Outlook as well). I am working on Windows 7. When looking through files (namely thumbnails of images) on our NAS drive whilst having an InDesign CS5.5 file open, we lose connection to whatever drive the InDesign file was on and InDesign crashes. It happens regardless of what drive the InDesign file is on - has crashed when using a file on the NAS drive, but mostly when we are using a file on a seperate network drive. More often than not the InDesign file has nothing to do with the NAS drive at all, no linked images or anything like that to it. The error message reads:

The network connection was lost for the file W:\DESIGN....etc.., or the file was modified by another process.

The NAS drive details are:

NAS is a NETGEAR ReadyNAS NVX Pioneer Edition [X-RAID2]

Firmware is RAIDiator 4.2.8

I believe it must be a problem specifically with the NAS drive, however we don't ever seem to lose conection when using other Adobe programmes, just InDesign. In saying that, Outlook will sometimes lose connection to I drive where our email PST files sit as well during the same InDesign error.

Has anyone ever had any similar problems or suggestions for what could be causing this?

PROBLEM 2:

It often takes us multiple goes to actually get InDesign to open a file properly. For me, if I click on an InDesign file to open it, InDesign will open, and I can see that the file is semi there but the entire artboard is grey and I can't click on anything and eventually it just turns into 'NOT RESPONDING' and I have to force quit and start it again. Sometimes this happens a few times before it actually opens. This is really frustrating and a massive time waster!

There are 3 designers in our office and all 3 of us have both of these problems occur sometimes multiple times a day.

It was 7.5 but I just updated today to 7.5.2. One of the other girls has been on 7.5.2 for a while now and has still encountered the same issues.

We also all realised today that we have issues with Adobe Acrobat. It will open a file and 'not respond' for the first 1-2 minutes that it's open and then go fine again. During that time you won't be able to click on anything and it usually turns grey and says Not Repsonding on the top of it. We use Adobe Acrobat X Pro version 10.0.0

The error for "The network connection was lost" is actually a feature put into InDesign by design. It's a protection mechanism that occurs when InDesign is unable to write to the file in question for a various number of reasons. By shutting down we do our best to preserve your file integrity through the restore function. If we didn't shut the process down you would run the risk of damaging your files with bad write data.

It can be found to occur for a variety of reasons ranging from switch issues in corporate environments to loose cables. No amount of patching at this time will resolve it, it's normally something that will have to be investigated and resolved on the networking side of things.

Our engineers are looking into options to help this behavior in the future by adding a delay and having InDesign recheck before going through with the shutdown as an update to the software but for the most part this is something that has to be resolved on the networking side.

Building from that, the second issue is likely tied to InDesign trying to pull data from the network source and being unable to do so. At this time, given not only your issues with InDesign and Outlook coinciding with the other issues, is that your network device/infrastructure needs to be looked at.

Thanks for the info Scott! I figured it must have been on the networking side of things for that to occur. I don't really have any problem with it closing on my work as I save every 3 seconds pretty much haha. It's just a real annoyance to have to close it all and re-open. And as we have to go into that NAS drive multiple times a day, it happens quite often. I will let the IT guys now about that.

Ahhh okay. Hmm. Looks like those IT guys will have their work cut out for them! This is why I vote we get Macs.

Well, Macs are not really immune to this either! What will sometimes happen for their equivelant error is the application stops responding.

I don't want to make this sound like it only happens over networks though. This type of error can happen even to devices that are attached to the computer itself, say a long spin-up time on an external HDD that fails to write when asked to by InDesign. Cable errors, mechanical issues, data backups happening at the same time you are trying to make use of the drive causing a bottleneck, all of these have been known to cause the problem.

Thought I'd give a wee update. I've been working with the IT guys to try eliminate what could be causing the problems. We've now ruled out InDesign as it will drop connection to I drive/Outlook whilst using the NAS drive without having InDesign running at all. We've also tested differenet network ports and it happens on all of them. So it's now looking like the common denominator is the NAS drive. Boo.

I'm having huge amounts of problems with this. We use ExpanDrive to set up a sftp connection to a remote server and create a drive in Finder. I've been using this setup for years using InDesign CS3 with no issues. CS5.5 though crashes regularly (thought not always). I wonder if it is not being patient enough for saves of complex layouts over a relatively slow WAN connection.

FYI, when this happens on my machine, it doesn't quit, it locks up and has to be killed via CTR-ALT-DEL. Also, if I leave a document open overnight and the connection is interrupted (as it is ever night), it locks up when I try to use InDesign again even if the network connection has been back up for hours.

I assume 1) because there is nothing in the manual that says he can't or shouldn't and 2) because he wants to.

Say I'm doing a new layout and I want to reuse content from 3 older ones. So I have all 4 opened at once, copying and pasting elements. It's much more convenient at the end of the day to just make one last save, lock the screen and go home. Come back in morning and voila all the stuff is there ready with panes organized just like I want them.

All I can say is that while you can't eliminate entirely the kinds of risks that happen from power fluctuations and hardware failures, you can greatly reduce them by closing files when no longer needed for the current work and especially when the computer will be left unattended for an extended period, and having been hit by these things I've learned the hard way to never leave files open when I leave the computer.

That aside, network disconnect is a known issue in ID, and I can't, honestly, understand why anyone who is aware of the problem, as maskedrider seems to be, would set themselves up for trouble by leaving files open overnight with nobody working.

Hi, I discovered in (Win 7 & 8 I assume) that if you go into your network adapter settings and click 'Configure' then go to the 'Power Management' menu there is an option to 'Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power'. I unchecked this and now no more crashing with the network connection lost error. Not sure it will work for everyone but might be the solution for some.

I have just done the update to CC from the cloud and it's like….worse than before…. i can hardly have my indesign open without it crashing with this same " network connection lost…fatal error" message.